


Steep Decline

by doublejoint



Category: Nana (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-breakup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29144148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: There was always going to be an ending, an "after this".
Relationships: Serizawa Layla/Takagi Yasushi
Kudos: 2
Collections: February Ficlet Challenge 2021: Apocalypse No





	Steep Decline

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 1 of the February Ficlet Challenge: After
> 
> Title from "A Record Year for Rainfall" by The Decemberists

It’s not as if he didn’t know. There was always going to be an ending, an “after this”, despite how much he’s wanted to deny it at times. It helps, maybe, that the only one he’s denying it to is himself; no one else is making him justify anything. No one else is asking; they make their own assumptions about the relationship, including her.

She knows, too, her face turned to look at him, as if to study his nose. He wrinkles it and she laughs, and he smiles, because she wants him to. He gives her what she wants, which is what she asks, which is not too much. It’s not anything he doesn’t feel like giving, nothing he can’t give, nothing she thinks he can give that he pretends he can. If he tried, she’d narrow her eyes at him; she’d see right through him without it.

Of course this kind of relationship would be the one that doesn’t sink its teeth into him. Of course, the nature of its impermanence, of the barriers between them, is what lets them see each other like this. Reira’s hand clasps his in his coat pocket, her nails digging into the callouses on the sides of his fingers, without her realizing. Her feet tread deliberately in the snow, and ahead of them, Takumi looks back, the shine of his jacket catching the streetlight. Reira’s face changes. 

She knows he knows, but it digs into him worse than her nails, worse than the cold at his earlobes, on his cheeks, sharp snowflakes on his skin. He can pretend all he wants that this is something of each of their own, but it’s not, really. They’re both too claimed already, she by Takumi’s gilded cage and he by his family, in name and expectation and duty and love. It’s not as if it’s not complicated for her, too, but he only sees a little of it from this distance, flattened into a blur. From what she’s told him, it’s more complicated for her than for him; he just has his parents and Ren, really, and his parents, at least, are straightforward, even if he still has too much difficulty, after all this time, accepting the weight of their love and the things he sees attached to that.

(It’s not, really, Yasu’s father has said, so many times, his voice growing tired and frail, and Yasu will not make him say it again, but he will also not take the chance.)

Sunglasses in the dark don’t prepare one well for a sudden snowball to the face. Yasu can’t duck in time; Reira laughs; Takumi and Naoki join her. Yasu’s face is too numb to feel it, and he’s still scraping the snow from his cheek when Naoki squawks, hit himself by Atsushi. Yasu crumples the snow over Reira’s head, a miniature cloud.

“You can throw it back, you know,” she says, daring him to.

He’s not stupid enough to take her up on it; Takumi would kill him for anything that could even marginally raise the risk of Reira catching cold. Another man would, perhaps, some day, laugh in the face of all that, but that’s not the kind of man Reira wants right now. She knows what she’s got; Yasu, despite everything, is dependably, reliably himself.

Naoki hides behind Reira, shoving Yasu out of the way; Takumi glares at all of them. 

When his hand catches Reira’s again, it’s cold. Both hands return to his pocket, only clasped loosely, his knuckles scraping up against an old coin, even colder than his skin already is. They can only sustain this so long; every voice runs out of breath, and every held note from an instrument eventually fades into nothing, the sound waves flattening out. Even drums break, though they are perhaps not as flimsy as guitar strings, as the human body.

She stands on tiptoe with her head on his chest, her hair under his chin, impossibly soft.

* * *

The inevitability hums louder in his ears, a motor in overdrive, bad feedback on the mic. At a certain point, being with Reira will no longer be worth the time he’s putting into the relationship, the bitter-tinged feeling like coffee grounds on the tip of his tongue. He is already too keenly aware of the ways in which she’s lying to herself, the stock she’s putting in this relationship. She says she doesn’t, but he’ll already hurt her more than he’d thought he might. The egg’s already cracked, though, hasn’t it?

He’s not that petty, but she’s not sparing him from any hurt, even if she could. So where does his responsibility end and hers begin? Is it wrong to have built a relationship without asking that question, at least of himself? To have not thought about where she would answer it, and to not know now?

He knows what Takumi would say, the person who’s not in their relationship but in it all the same, absorbed into the barrier between them. But that had been another term and condition of this. Not fair, but does Yasu have a place to lecture from, when if he had to make the choice he’d put Ren first before Reira? Before anyone else? Because he’s in a position where he doesn’t have to, does luck lend him the right to be smug?

Can he be any sort of happy, twisted or no, like this? Can he not pretend when she’s holding up her side of the facade so beautifully, on such thin arms? It’s wrong to mistake her lack of opportunity for weakness, but she’s got such brittle bones. And someday soon she will ask too much of him, and it will all fall away, like snow crumbling over the side of the rock where the slope can hold it no longer.

How long will it be after that until he forgets the taste of her in his mouth, the feeling of her nails on his skin? Though perhaps the better question is, how long will he remember?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
